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Old 23-02-2008, 09:41 PM
jet486
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White Balance

Just started to take some night shots with a Nikon D70s with tripod and one of the settings on the camera is for the white balance to be set at Tungsten but in the D70 settings it reads Incandescent,Fluorescent,Dir.sunlig ht,Flash,Cloudy,Shade and PRE. Which setting should it be set at? Cheers
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Old 24-02-2008, 04:48 AM
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iceman (Mike)
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HI Jet

I'd leave it at AUTO. It does a fairly good job most of the time.

In fact, if you're taking your images in RAW then it doesn't matter what it's set to as you can change it in post-processing, but still AUTO is the best and easiest and I get fairly accurate results with that.
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Old 24-02-2008, 07:55 AM
jet486
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Thanks iceman. Just wondering what software would you recommend to process RAW images. Cheers
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Old 24-02-2008, 10:25 PM
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Leave it on auto. You'll introduce false colouring otherwise but if you shoot in RAW mode, its a snap to remove false colour in Photoshop CS2 or 3.
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Old 24-02-2008, 11:05 PM
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My thoughts on auto white balance are that it may not be that desirable. Why? Well, even auto has to use some value for the white point, and it may change between images as you have not forced it to one specific temperature. Setting it to sunny for example, or even a specific temperature point if your camera supports it, will use a consistent value for all images.

Years ago when the DSLRs were just making it into use for astro work, some of the more prominent members of the astro imaging community advocated using "sunny". I'm not sure on the reason, most likely it was due to that being a temperature in the middle of the range and therefore the least likely to result in false colour. I'll have to check my archives.
Of course you can override white balance in your RAW conversion process to use the same value for all images,
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Old 25-02-2008, 02:53 AM
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OK, I tracked it down. The reasoning given for using "daylight" white balance was that auto was resulting in an image that was too blue in earlier Canon DSLRs. Additionally, with a modified camera it results in an image that is too red.

Current recommended procedure is to calibrate your white balance to a G2 type star, or custom calibrate your camera using an image of a white card shot in unfiltered sunlight. The ImagesPlus yahoo group has a lot of useful information on this subject, but you will need to subscribe to the group (free) in order to read the archives.

Regards,
Eric
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